Report: WSJ slow on hacking story

The special committee tasked with overseeing journalistic practices at the Wall Street Journal dinged the paper on Monday for being “slower than it should have been” to report on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal in the U.K., but concluded the Journal’s reporting isn’t pro-Rupert Murdoch.

The five-member committee, which was largely discredited within months of its 2007 formation when it allowed Rupert Murdoch to remove then-editor Marcus Brauchli, penned an op-ed discussing its analysis for the paper’s coverage.

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“The Journal was slower than it should have been at the outset to pursue the phone-hacking scandal story, in our opinion, though it is doing much better now with aggressive coverage, fitting placement in the paper, and unflinching headlines,” the committee wrote. “We agree it could have done a better job with a recent story allowing Mr. Murdoch to get his side of the story on the record without tougher questioning. We have discussed this with the involved editors.”

The panel concluded, “But a pattern of wrongdoing? A culture of journalistic malpractice? Shills for Rupert Murdoch or anybody else? That is not the newsroom we have observed over our four years.”

The committee wrote that it did not find any evidence that “the journalistic rot on sad display in the U.K.” has infested Dow Jones and the Journal.

The committee said it conducted a survey of 2,000 Journal and Dow Jones journalists and didn’t find anyone who felt pressured into forming reporting to fit a specific political worldview. Yet it acknowledged reporters and editors may not feel free to tell the truth in their survey.

“Sure, a reporter who blows the whistle on his or her boss might consider whether that might bring an early end to a promising career,” the committee wrote. “An editor who blows the whistle might worry that the powers-that-be will sooner or later have his or her scalp. And there are those who say that all those 2,000 Journal reporters and Newswires correspondents might just be self-censoring themselves rather than standing up for what they believe in.”

It continued: “But our conversations at the paper tell us that this sells short the staffs at the Journal and Newswires, which are full of talented, experienced, principled people. And it strikes us as difficult to believe that one could suppress information about a determined effort to devalue the journalistic standards of Dow Jones for long.”